Stories

by Helen Garner

  ‘I feel like going for a walk,’ she said.

  ‘Bon. D’accord,’ said the man.

  ‘Want to come with me?’

  ‘Tu vas où?’

  ‘Up to Sacré Coeur and back. Not far.’

  ‘Ouf,’ said the man. ‘All those steps.’ He put one paper down and unfolded the next.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said the woman. ‘Won’t you come? I’m bored.’

  ‘I don’t want to go down into the street,’ said the man. ‘I have to go down there every day. I get sick of it. Today I feel like staying home.’

  The woman pulled a dead leaf off the pot plant. ‘Just for an hour?’ she said.

  ‘Too many tourists,’ said the man. ‘You go. I’ll have a little sleep. Anyway it’s going to rain.’

  Late in the afternoon the man went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He looked inside it, then shut it again. He walked across the squeaking parquet to the bedroom. The woman was lying on her stomach reading a book by the light of a shaded lamp. Her wet boots stood in the corner by the window.

  ‘There’s nothing to eat,’ said the man. ‘No one went to the market.’

  The woman looked up. ‘What about the fish?’

  ‘Yes, the fish is there.’

  ‘We can eat the fish, then.’

  ‘There’s nothing to have with it.’

  The woman marked her place with one finger.

  ‘What happened to the brussels sprouts?’ she said. ‘Did the others eat them last night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, let’s have fish and brussels sprouts.’

  Before she had finished the sentence the man was shaking his head.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Fish and green vegetables are never eaten together.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They are not eaten together.’

  The woman closed the book. ‘People have salad with fish. That’s green.’

  ‘Salad is different. Salad is a separate course. It is not served on the same plate.’

  ‘Can you explain to me,’ said the woman, ‘the reason why fish and green vegetables must not be eaten together?’ The man looked at his hand against the white wall. ‘It is not done,’ he said. ‘They do not complement each other. Fish and potatoes, yes. Frites. Pommes de terre au four. But not green vegetables.’

  ‘It’s getting on for dinner time,’ said the woman. She turned on her back and clasped her hands behind her head. ‘The others will be back soon.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ said the man. He moved his feet closer together and pushed his hands into his pockets.

  ‘If I were you,’ said the woman. ‘If I were you and it was my turn to cook, and if there was nothing to eat except fish and green vegetables, do you know what I’d do? I’d cook fish and green vegetables. That’s what I’d do.’

  ‘Ecoute,’ said the man. ‘There are always good chemical and aesthetic reasons behind customs.’

  ‘Yes, but what are they.’

  ‘I’m sure if we looked it up in the Larousse Gastronomique it would be explained.’

  The woman got off the low bed and went to the window in her socks and T-shirt. She looked out.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Where I come from, we just eat what’s there.’

  ‘And it is not a secret,’ said the man, ‘that where you come from the food is barbaric.’

  The woman kept her back to the room. ‘My mother cooked nice food. We had nice meals.’

  ‘Chops,’ said the man. ‘Hamburgers. I heard you telling my mother. “La bouffe est dégueulasse,” you said. That’s what you said.’

  ‘I said “était”. It was. It used to be. But it’s not any more. It’s not now.’

  The man took a set of keys out of his pocket and began to flip them in and out of his palm.

  ‘Aren’t there any onions?’ said the woman, still looking out the window.

  ‘No. Not even onions.’

  ‘I don’t see,’ said the woman, ‘that you’ve got any choice. What choice have you got? Unless you cook the fish by itself, or just the sprouts.’

  ‘There would not be enough for everybody.’

  The woman turned round from the grey window. ‘Why don’t you go out into the kitchen and cook it up. Cook what’s there. Just cook it up and see what happens. And if the others don’t like it they can take their custom elsewhere.’

  The man took a deep breath. He put the keys back in his pocket. He scratched his head until his hair stood up in a crest. ‘J’ai mal fait mon marché,’ he said. ‘I should have planned better. We should have—’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said the woman. She leaned against the closed window. ‘What’s the matter with you? It’s only food.’

  The man put his bare foot on the edge of the mattress and bounced it once, twice.

  ‘Tu vois?’ he said. ‘Tu vois comment tu es? “Only food.” No French person would ever, ever say “It’s only food”.’

  ‘But it is only food,’ said the woman. ‘In the final analysis that’s what it is. It’s to keep us alive. It’s to stop us from feeling hungry for a couple of hours so we can get our minds off our stomachs and go about our business. And all the rest is only decoration.’

  ‘Oh là là,’ said the man. ‘Tu es—’

  He flattened his hair with one hand, and let his hand fall to his side. Then he turned and walked back into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator. The fish lay on its side on a white plate. He opened the cupboard under the window. The brussels sprouts, cupped in their shed outer leaves, sat on a paper bag on the bottom shelf. The man stood in the middle of the room and looked from one open door to the other, and back again.

  LITTLE HELEN’S SUNDAY AFTERNOON

  LATE ON A winter Sunday afternoon, Little Helen stood behind her mother on the verandah of Noah’s house. Her mother raised her finger to the buzzer but the door opened from the inside and Noah’s father came hurrying out.

  ‘Bad luck, girls,’ he said. He was pulling on his jacket. ‘Just got a call from Northern General. Some kid’s cut his finger off.’

  ‘His whole finger?’ said Little Helen. ‘Right off?’

  ‘I hope someone slung it in the icebox,’ said Little Helen’s mother. ‘What a time to make you work.’

  ‘Unpaid work,’ said Noah’s mother. ‘Will I save you some soup, Jim?’

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Noah’s father. ‘Four thirty. I’ll have to do a graft. Five thirty, six, six thirty. Yeah. Save me some.’

  As he talked he walked, and was already in the car. The drive was full of coloured leaves.

  Little Helen’s mother and Noah’s were sisters and liked to shriek a lot when visiting.

  ‘Little Helen!’ said Noah’s mother. ‘Jump up! Let me have a hold of you!’

  Little Helen stepped out from behind her mother, bent her knees, raised her arms and sprang. Noah’s mother caught her, but staggered and gave a cry. ‘Ark! You used to be such a fairy little thing. Last time you were here you sat on my knee and do you know what you said? You said, “I love being small!”’

  Little Helen went red and dropped her eyes. She saw her own foot, in its large, strapped blue shoe, swinging awkwardly near her aunt’s hip.

  ‘Come on, Meg,’ said Little Helen’s mother. ‘Let’s pop into the bedroom. I’ve got some business to conduct. It’s in this bag.’

  Noah’s mother unclasped her hands under Little Helen’s bottom and let her slide to the ground.

  ‘Another hair shirt, is it,’ she said to Little Helen’s mother. ‘I suppose I’ll be left holding the baby.’

  ‘What are you going to call it if it’s a boy?’ said Little Helen.

  The women looked at each other. Their cheeks puffed out and their lips went tight. They went into the bedroom and closed the door without answering her question. Little Helen could hear them screeching and crashing round in front of the mirror. She knew that it was not a hair shirt at all, but a pair of shoes her mother
had paid a lot of money for and worn once then discovered they were too big, and which she hoped that Noah’s mother would buy from her. Little Helen brushed the back of her tartan skirt down flat and stood in the hallway. She saw her own feet parallel. She thought of a waitress. It was a long time ago, in the dining room of the Bull and Mouth Hotel in Stawell. The waitress was quite old and she stood patiently, holding her order pad and pencil, while Little Helen’s father took a long time to make up his mind what to have. Little Helen, who always had roast lamb, tried to stop looking at the waitress’s feet, but could not. There was nothing special about the feet. But the neatness of their position, two inches apart and perfectly parallel on the carpet’s green and orange flowers, caused Little Helen to experience a painful sadness. She decided to have chicken instead.

  ‘Chicken’s pretty risky,’ said her father.

  ‘I want chicken, though,’ said Little Helen.

  She got chicken. It was all right but rather dry. She ate more of it than she wanted.

  ‘How’s the chicken?’ said her father.

  ‘A bit risky,’ said Little Helen.

  Her father laughed so much that everyone at the other tables turned to stare.

  Little Helen knew she was clever but she noticed that words did not always bear the same simple, serious meaning that they had at school when she copied them into her exercise book. On her spelling list she had the word ‘capacious’ to put into a sentence. ‘The elephant is a capacious beast,’ she wrote. Her mother’s mouth trembled when Little Helen showed her the twenty finished sentences, in best writing and ruled off. She explained why ‘capacious’ was not quite right. Her polite kindness and her trembling mouth made Little Helen blush until tears filled her eyes.

  Little Helen stood outside her aunt’s bedroom and waited for something to happen. Time became elastic, and sagged. She hated visiting. She had to be dragged away from her wooden table, her full set of Derwents, her different inks and textas, her special paper-cutting scissors, her rulers and sharpeners and rubbers. The teacher never gave her enough homework. She could have worked all weekend.

  She did not like the feeling of other people’s houses. There was nothing to do. Pieces of furniture stood sparsely in chilly rooms. The long stretches of skirting board were empty of meaning, and the kitchen smells were mournful, as if the saucepans on the stove contained nothing but grey bones boiling for a soup.

  The bedroom door opened and Little Helen’s mother poked her head out. She had been laughing. Her face was pink and she was wearing nothing but a bra and pants and a black hat like a box with a bit of net hanging over her eyes.

  ‘We’re having dress-ups,’ she said. ‘Want to come in and play?’

  Little Helen was embarrassed and shook her head. They didn’t know how to play properly. They were much too tall and had real bosoms, and they talked all the time about how much they had paid for the clothes and where they would go to wear them, instead of being serious and thoughtful about what the clothes meant in the game.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so unsociable!’ said her mother. ‘Go and see Noah.’

  ‘He won’t want to see me,’ said Little Helen. ‘Anyway I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘He’s out the back,’ shouted his mother from inside the bedroom. ‘Probably making something. Some white elephant or other.’

  They started to laugh again, and Little Helen’s mother went back into the bedroom and slammed the door.

  Little Helen plodded down the hall and entered the kitchen. The lunch dishes were all over the sink. Between the stacked plates she found quite a lot of tinned sweet corn, crusted with cold butter. She put her mouth down to the china and sucked up the scrapings. Her palate took on a coating of grease. She moved over to the pantry cupboard and helped herself to five Marie biscuits, some peeled almonds, four squares of cooking chocolate and a handful of crystallised ginger. Eating fast and furtively, bolting the food inside the big dark cupboard, she started to get that rude and secret feeling of wanting to do a shit. She crossed her legs and squeezed her bum shut, and went on guzzling. A little salvo of farts escaped into her pants and if something funny had occurred to her at that moment she would not have been able to hang on; but she kept her mind on that poor boy who had cut his finger off, and gradually she felt the lump go back up inside her for later.

  If she ate any more she would spoil her tea. She hitched up her skirt, wiped her palms on her pants, and set out across the kitchen towards the wide glass door.

  Noah’s yard was long and sloped steeply down to the back fence. The trees had no leaves, and from the porch steps Little Helen could see for miles and miles, as far as the centre of the city. She paused to stare at the tiny bunch of skyscrapers, like a city in a film, and at the long curved bridge beyond them with its chain of lights already flicking on. The afternoon was nearly over. It was not raining now. Water lay in puddles on the sky-blue plastic cover of the swimming pool. The branches of bare bushes were a glossy black, like a licked pencil lead.

  Little Helen’s feet sank into the spongy grass. Her shoes looked very large and blue on the greenness. The grass was so green that it made her feel sick. The sky was low. An unnatural light leaked out of the clouds, and the chords the light played were in the same dull, complicated key as the grass-sickness. The air did not move. It was cold. Her legs felt white and thin under the pleated skirt.

  Grass grew right up to the shed door, which was shut. Noah must be in there. She stood outside it and paid attention. There was a noise like somebody using sandpaper on a piece of wood, but softer; like two people using sandpaper, two rhythms not quite hitting the same beat. Someone laughed.

  Little Helen saw a red plastic bucket half under the shed. She pulled it out and turned it upside down. Its bottom was cracked and it was almost too weak to hold her, but by keeping her shoes on the very outside of its rim she could balance on it and get her head up to the window. Rags had been hooked across it on the inside, and only one small corner was uncovered. She put her eye to it. It was even darker inside. In there the night had already begun. How could he see what he was doing?

  She shifted her left foot on the bucket and missed the rim. The toe of her shoe pierced the split base. Her fingers lost their hold on the windowsill. A fierce sharpness scraped through her sock and raked its claws up her shin. She swivelled sideways with a grunt, lurched against the shed wall, and stumbled out on to the lawn. Shocked and gasping, she found herself still upright, but with the red bucket clamped round her left leg just below the knee.

  In the upper part of the sky, above the bunch of skyscrapers, the clouds split like rotten cloth and let a flat blade of light through. It leaned between sky and earth, a crooked pillar. Little Helen took a breath. She clenched her fists. She opened her mouth and bellowed.

  ‘Noah!’

  There was a silence, then a harsh scrabbling inside the shed.

  ‘Come out!’ bawled Little Helen. ‘Come out and see me! It’s not fair! I’m tired of waiting!’

  Her shin was stinging very hard, as if her mother had already pressed on to the broken skin the Listerine-soaked cotton wool. Her invisible left sock felt wet. Little Helen thought, ‘I could easily be crying.’ The shed door was wrenched open and a huge boy with red hair and skin like boiled custard burst through. He was croaking.

  ‘You were spying! Who said you could spy on me?’

  Something strange had happened to Noah, and not only to his voice. The whole shape of his head had changed. He didn’t look like a boy any more. He looked like a dog, or a fish. His eyes were like slits, and had moved higher up his face and outwards into his temples.

  ‘Look, Noah,’ whispered Little Helen. She was not sure whether she meant the drunken pillar of light or the bucket on her leg. He took three steps towards her and grabbed her by the arm. She jerked her face away from the smell of him: not just sweaty but raw, like steak.

  ‘If you tell what you saw,’ he choked. Red patches flared low on his speckled cheeks. />
  ‘It was dark,’ said Little Helen. She could feel blood running down into her cotton sock. ‘I couldn’t even see in. I couldn’t see anything. I only heard the noise. I promise.’

  He dragged her towards the shed door. The grass squelched under his thick-soled jogging shoes. She had to stagger with her legs apart because of the bucket, but he did not notice it, and pushed her up the step. Another boy was standing just inside. Their great bodies, panting and stinking, filled the shed.

  ‘Don’t bring her in here, you fuckwit!’ said the other boy. His shoelaces were undone and he was doing up his trousers. ‘I’m going home.’

  The shed smelt of cigarettes. They must have smoked a whole packet. They would get lung cancer. They would get into really bad trouble. The other boy bent to tie his lace and Little Helen saw that there was a third person in the shed. A girl was sitting on a sleeping bag that was spread out on the floor. She was pulling on her boots. As she scrambled to her feet she spotted Little Helen’s bucket. She stopped on all fours in dog position and looked up into Little Helen’s face. Her eyes were caked with black stuff and her hair was stiff, like burnt grass. She laughed; Little Helen could see all her back teeth.

  ‘Ha!’ said the girl. ‘Now you know what happens to people who snoop. Come on, Justin. Let’s go.’

  She stood up and buckled her belt. The two of them barged out the door. Little Helen heard their feet thumping on the grass and then crunching on the gravel drive.

  ‘I know what you’ve been doing,’ said Little Helen. The butts were everywhere. Some had lipstick on the yellow end.

  ‘Shut your face,’ said Noah. In the grey light from the open door his head with its short orange hair and flat temples was as smooth and savage as a bull terrier’s. He gave a high snigger. ‘You look stupid with that bucket on your leg.’